Robert Schumann

Zwickau, where his father ran a bookshop and a publishing house, gave Schumann a literary education before a musical one, and it never left him: the piano cycles of his twenties are built like collections of short stories. Law studies in Leipzig and Heidelberg were abandoned for music and for lessons with Friedrich Wieck, and the 1830s produced Papillons, Carnaval, the Davidsbündlertänze, Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana, the Études symphoniques and the Fantasie in C. In 1834 he founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and edited it for ten years, writing under the invented names Florestan and Eusebius, the impetuous and the dreaming halves of one critical temperament; he announced Chopin in 1831 and Brahms in 1853, and was right about both. The year 1840 brought an outpouring of song — Dichterliebe, Frauenliebe und -leben, the two Liederkreis sets — and the years after it the four symphonies, the Piano Concerto in A minor and the chamber music. Clara Schumann, the leading pianist of the age and his closest musical partner, gave many of these works their first performances and kept them in the repertoire for forty years after his death in 1856. An injury to a finger of his right hand closed off the virtuoso career; his first published opus, the Abegg Variations, had appeared in 1831. Mendelssohn conducted the First Symphony in Leipzig in 1841 and invited him to teach at the new conservatory there, while the Düsseldorf years brought the post of municipal music director, the Cello Concerto in A minor and the Rhenish Symphony, and ended with the loss of that post in 1853. He and Clara married in 1840, and he died in a private asylum at Endenich, near Bonn.